Each side of the long room had three rows of freestanding bookcases. Some of the cases held enormous, oversize volumes. Some of the covers and spines of those had titles in gold foil. One of the cases had locked glass doors covering the entire face of it, further restricting access to the books it contained in a room that was already highly restricted.
The glass doors weren’t simply locked. Richard knew that the books behind those glass doors were some of the most dangerous of the books in the library, books so dangerous that the wizards of the time when the library had been created did not want to trust the simple trick of making those books look unimportant. Those glass doors were sealed with spells that required considerable skill and Subtractive Magic to open.
Richard knew that many of the most dangerous books, those on the shelves and those behind locked glass doors, spoke of him. They called him by many different names. They spoke of him centuries before he had even been born. They expressed grave warnings, and profound hopes.
On the distant side of the room to Richard’s left, beyond the rows of bookcases, there was a sitting area with three comfortable-looking chairs. Except that he couldn’t imagine anyone using them, because they had the same ugly orange stripes as the chairs in the sitting area outside the library. Richard knew the true purpose of the ugly orange stripes.
In the center of the room, between the rows of bookcases to each side, stood a long, heavy oak table with massive, turned wooden legs. A few wooden chairs sat at random angles around it, as if the people using them had just gotten up for a moment, but never came back. Richard had been one of those people.
A number of simple, unimportant-looking books lay open on the table. Richard was the one, quite a while back, who had left those books there. A few small stacks of books on the table were ones he had collected from the shelves and left there in case he needed to come back to search them for things that could help him. The whole library looked like a cozy, inviting place to read. But Richard knew that, like some others, this room was more than simply a library, and it was anything but cozy.
As Dori gazed about the room, he went to the end of the far wall on his right and pulled the heavy drapes across the tall windows made up of squares of thick, clouded glass. It was a very special type of glass that only the most knowledgeable wizards in an age long past knew how to make. It took not only Additive Magic to create such spiraled glass, but Subtractive as well, to say nothing of special knowledge and arcane skills.
“What are you doing?” Dori asked. She sounded annoyed and impatient.
“Just hoping to make you comfortable,” Richard said over his shoulder as he made sure the drapes were light-tight.
When satisfied, he blew out the flame on one of the nearby reflector lamps. He smiled at her.
“I know how you prefer the dark.”
“I have spent time with that woman, the mother of this body. She has magic,” Dori added with growling distaste. “Magic is not the incomprehensible mystery I thought at first. I have observed the woman and it is not so strong a thing, this magic your kind has.”
“No,” Richard agreed with a sigh. “I suppose not.”
He blew out the flame of another lamp on his way by. With the heavy drapes drawn over the windows and doors, only two lamps, one at either end of the room, were left to light the grand library. They were woefully inadequate for the task and left the middle of the room in deep shadows. Dori smiled her approval. Richard had to be careful not to run into the rows of bookcases.
“What are the terms for my surrender?” he asked as he returned to the center of the room.
“Terrrrms?” she rasped. “No terrrrms.” The very word was obviously distasteful to her. “Surrender is unconditional. In return for saving me the trouble of having to hunt you down and kill you, I will grant you the indulgence of a quick death. It will be terrifyingly painful, of course, but quick. That is your reward for surrendering. That, and the knowledge that you will not have to witness what is to come for the rest of your world. You should be groveling at my feet in gratitude for sparing you that.”
“What about the Mother Confessor?”
Dori frowned her displeasure. “She did not offer to surrender. Unlike you, she still resists the inevitable. She will again feel our claws, but this time, as she screams her lungs out, she will also feel our teeth as they rip her face from her skull. We will suck out her eyes and brains and gorge on her flesh. We will smear her blood on ourselves for the pleasure of the warm, wet, greasy feel of it.”
Richard desperately wanted to draw his sword. Its magic was screaming for release. He denied that magic its urgent need. He controlled his own rage, as the Sisters of the Light had for so long sought to teach him. As he smiled at the little girl, it occurred to him that the Sisters would be proud of how far he had come.
What they wouldn’t have understood, though, was how he was able to turn that fury inward. Richard blew out one of the two remaining lamps by the ugly orange chairs and then returned to the center of the room. In the murky light of the one remaining lamp off in the distance behind him, he could barely see Dori at the opposite end of the long table.
“Who are you, exactly?” Richard asked across the length of the heavy table. “It seems I should be allowed to know who you are, since I have agreed to surrender.”
“I am the Golden Goddess.”
Richard shrugged. “Well, I know that much. What I mean is”—he leaned in—“who are you? What are you?”
Dori effortlessly sprang up onto the top of the other end of the heavy oak table like something out of a nightmare. She slowly walked down the length of the table toward him, her heels clicking with each measured step, a predator locked on to its prey.
“I am the bringer of the tide of my kind,” she said in a low, guttural growl. “A coming tide that will wash over your kind, wash over your world, and drown you all.” She came to a halt above him at his end of the table. She glared down at him. “I am the Golden Goddess, the bringer of that tide.”
In the dead silence, with shadows all around her, she slowly lifted both arms out at her sides and opened her fingers, palms up, summoning that tide forth.
First one began to appear, then another; then the whole room started coming alive with movement. It was just as Kahlan had described it, like scribbles in the air, dizzyingly fast lines upon swirling lines, faster and faster, arcing, looping, tracing through the air, indications of their shape and mass and size. Because it was impossible to make it all fit any notion of what was real, what was solid, what existed, and what didn’t, it was a disorienting sight.
At least it was until those scribbly lines began to thicken, as if they were now being drawn in gooey, muddy water. Those thickening lines began to fuse together, revealing their true forms, until they finally materialized in the gloom all around him. The whole process took only seconds, but in those few seconds, the whole world seemed to change as it suddenly came alive with creatures more terrifying than anything he could have imagined.
“My children,” Dori said in a low, menacing snarl as she held out her arms, this time in introduction. “They have come for you.”
All around, more and more of those scribbles in midair were coalescing into dark, wet shapes, tall, massive, and muscular. They stood on two legs, hunched a little. He could just make out the claws at the ends of powerful arms. Steam or vapor of some kind rose from the black, glistening bodies. Globs of gelatinous material slid down off their lumpy, amphibious-like skin, dripping from the creatures to splash on the floor.